Relaxation of surface tension in the free-surface boundary layers of simple Lennard-Jones liquids

In this paper we use molecular dynamics to answer a classical question: how does the surface tension on a liquid/gas interface appear? After defining surface tension from the first principles and performing several consistency checks, we perform a dynamic experiment with a single simple liquid nanodroplet. At time zero, we remove all molecules of the interfacial layer of molecules, creating a fresh bare interface with the bulk arrangement of molecules. After that the system evolves towards equilibrium, and the expected surface tension is re-established. We found that the system relaxation consists of three distinct stages. First, the mechanical balance is quickly re-established. During this process the notion of surface tension is meaningless. In the second stage, the surface tension equilibrates, and the density profile broadens to a value which we call “intrinsic” interfacial width. During the third stage, the density profile continues to broaden due to capillary wave excitations, which does not however affect the surface tension.We have observed this scenario for monatomic Lennard-Jones (LJ) liquid as well as for binary LJ mixtures at different temperatures, monitoring a wide range of physical observables.

Provincialism and the modern diaspora: T.S. Eliot and David Jones

This article considers how T. S. Eliot's promotion of the work of the Anglo-Welsh poet David Jones after the Second World War further involved him in a process of considering the resonances of the local and familiar as operative within the displacements of modernity. This promotion therefore retrospectively prioritized an aspect of Eliot's poetics which had been present, but occluded, all along. Conversely, the article considers how similar resonances in Jones's own work were enhanced by his encounter with Eliot's translation of the Francophone Caribbean poet St-John Perse's Anabase, an encounter which enabled Jones to establish an idiom responsive to the divergent cultural affinities inherent in ‘our situation’.